LBird
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
alanjjohnstone wrote: “This thread is evidence for all those modern-day neo-Bakuninists who wished that a certain Karl Marx had never existed, as comments regurgitate his words as if they are religious canon.
Socialism for me is not the preserve of any one thinker or activist, no matter how erudite he (or she) might be.
They only make contributions and none are existential to the socialist idea….
And before someone says it, yes i am prepared to throw the baby out with the bath-water.”
That’s an entirely proper political and philosophical position to take, alan.
But, if one is to reject Marx in parts, or in his entirety, since Marx has been so influential in notions of democratic socialism, one must specify which parts and why.
It’s clear to me that most materialists are, in effect, ‘realists’ in modern philosophy of science terms.
But ‘realism’ was dealt a heavy blow by Einstein’s ‘relativity’, and has never been able to recover, and so, under the influence of post-war US physics, has simply stopped the philosophical discussions between physicists, that were fundamental to ‘physics’ prior to the war.
The ironic thing, for us, is that Marx preceded bourgeois science by 70 years, and his works provided a basis for a 20st century physics, where humanity is central to the philosophy of physics. But, that Marx is not the Marx of the materialists. Materialism is a bourgeois ideology past its time.
Democratic socialism will require a democratic science, and Marx can give us some pointers how this can be so.
As for me, I fear that some potential democratic socialists will be “prepared to throw the baby out with the bath-water”. I think that would be a mistake in the 21st century.
robbo203 wrote: “I wish you would stop misrepresenting what you call the SPGB’s “materialism”. You know very well by now it is emphatically not the 18th-century mechanical materialism espoused by the likes of Lenin and co”
But that’s the entire political and philosophical point, robbo.
There is a contradiction between the SPGB’s alleged ‘democracy’ and ‘materialism’. One has to give way to the other.
I’ve asked the materialists within the SPGB (and they don’t have to adhere to materialism, but at present they do) do they accept Marx’s views about democratic social production, or not. Marx was clearly writing about all social production, physical and academic, ideal and material, social and individual. So, a Marxist would expect the answer that all social production within a socialist society would be democratic. Seems simple.
But you and the other materialists insist that there are areas of social production that are not amenable to democratic production, like ‘science’. Marx famously warned that materialists would do this, that they would claim that within human society there exists an elite of specialists who would determine ‘the material’ for the majority. And this would divide society into two.
This is precisely the answer that you, as a materialist, give. You deny that democracy is required in certain areas of social production. Lenin did this, too. Thus, the SPGB seems to espouse the same politics as Lenin – that of a ‘special consciousness’ within a cadre, separate from the majority of the associated producers.
And just as Lenin did, materialists (holding to the ideological belief that there is only two basic philosophies) claim that anyone who argues against this ‘materialism’ that Marx condemned, is an ‘idealist’. It’s not a term of analysis, but simply abuse.
Marx reconciled both idealism and materialism, into a third philosophy – social productionism (in effect, part-idealism-part-materialism).
robbo203 wrote: “The SPGB/s materialism IS Marx’s materialism.”
I’ve shown time and time again that this is an untrue claim. Marx was a democrat, Lenin wasn’t. The SPGB currently espouses the same ideology as Lenin did. But… the SPGB can change itself – unlike the SWP.
ALB’s link to Marx: “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. ” [my bold]
As ALB has already agreed, by ‘material’, Marx meant ‘social’ (ie. both consciousness and being). So, the above passage could just as well say:
“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the social activity and the social intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their social behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. ”
It’s nothing to do with ‘matter’ producing ‘ideas’.
Marx’s fundamental concept is ‘production’. Human production. Social production. “Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc”
Nice one, alan!
The sooner that the SPGB says ‘Goodbye-ee’ to materialism, the better!
Have you kept up with this thread, and decided to side with Marx?
Or are you still refusing to say ‘Goodbye-ee’ to the ridiculous notion that your ‘consciousness’ is determined by inanimate matter?
If so, you’ll have to explain how ‘stuff’ made you a socialist, in the absence of you thinking about it. You’d have to be a clockwork machine, and to be telling other workers that the ‘clockwork mechanism’ made you a socialist, and it will do the same for them!
I can see them stifling their laughter already! Then they’ll get on with their lives, entirely ignorant of any ideas about democratic socialism, because you insist that ‘the material conditions’ will make them socialists.
It’s not Marx’s view, alan.
ALB wrote: “The Young Hegelians, of which Marx was one for a while, threw out God and gave “human consciousness” the status of being the creator of the world.
If you take this position then you argue that the way to change the world is to change consciousness. Marx disagreed and broke with the Young Hegelians to argue that the way to change the world was to change the…”
So far, so good, ALB.
But, “… material conditions of life that gave rise to content of the consciousness.”
As you agreed earlier, by ‘material’, Marx meant ‘social’ (as in ‘social being’, ‘social consciousness’), so this latter claim can’t be correct.
For Marx, ‘material’, as you’ve agreed, encompassed ‘ideas’ and ‘things’, and so it is wrong to claim that these ‘give rise to the content of consciousness’, because the ‘material/social conditions’ already contain ‘content of consciousness’.
You’re still trying to claim that ‘consciousness’ is produced by ‘material’. Not for Marx it wasn’t. For Marx, human social theory and practice produces changes in ‘material’, ‘social’, ‘being’ and ‘consciousness’.
Self-change, self-emancipation. The ‘self’ Marx refers to is ‘humanity’.
We produce and change our ‘material’ and our ‘consciousness’.
The only way out of this, is to claim that matter/being/stuff/things changes consciousness.
But, as Marx pointed out, because this is untrue (and it’s really human conscious activity which produces all changes), those who make your claim are going to be the ones who provide their ‘consciousness’, and pretend that ‘matter’ itself makes the change in consciousness for everyone else.
Thus, those who claim that “material conditions of life that gave rise to content of the consciousness” have to divide society into two parts – them, a minority (who hide the fact that its their ‘consciousness’ that’s producing the practice in ‘theory and practice’), and the majority, who are kidded into waiting for ‘material’, rather than the majority themselves, to ‘give rise to content of the consciousness’.
Who educates the educator?
robbo203 wrote: “Therefore it is not possible to argue, and Marx himself certainly did not argue, that that consciousness and being are both necessary in any account of ‘origin’ of either.”
Here’s Marx’s words, again, in this thread, robbo. Do try and remember the points being made, or we’ll just go round in circles – or is that your method?
Marx wrote: “Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said: You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings – a species-act of human beings – has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect – the infinite progression which leads you further to inquire: Who begot my father? Who his grandfather? etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in procreation, man thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progress which drives me ever further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask yourself whether that progress as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, ||XI| then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?” [my bold]
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
alanjjohnstone wrote: “Social production – the scientific key to our mystery. Not ‘mind’ nor ‘matter’, but US. And we can change both.
Not unless you set about engaging in organised political and economic action and for all your claimed insights, you have offered no strategy or offered any participation or involvement in that process of change, have you?
You have no aspiration for any audience other than a handful on this forum who have repeatedly rejected your philosophical overtures towards them.
I await a sign of your own “activity”, LBird”
It’s still a surprise that you don’t read what I write, alan.
‘Us’. ‘We’.
Not the individualist (your ideology) ‘your own’.
I’m all for, and have often done, “set about engaging in organised political and economic action“. I rejected the SWP because it was not Democratic Communist nor Marxist, but was Engelsist and Leninist.
Imagine my surprise to discover that the SPGB follows as similar ideology to the SWP, materialism, to the same ends: ‘socialism’ meaning an elite of active ‘specialists’ and a mass of passive ‘generalists’.
But, the difference is, while the SWP makes no bones about its supposed specially conscious Central Committee, the SPGB claims to be democratic, which implies that it allows for ideological change within its ranks. Of course, you and the other materialists have ‘repeatedly rejected’ both my and Marx’s ‘philosophical overtures’. But, will youse all continue to do so?
Of course, being an ideological materialist, you define ‘activity’ as merely ‘doing stuff without thought’, or ‘practice’ without ‘theory’, so you can skip the necessary building of ideas and theory to inform our activity. So, you can skip the democratic stage, and press on with your supposed ‘own “activity” ‘ – but I can’t.
So, alan, you can carry on with blind practice, or come over to Marx, and start discussing the building of democratic socialism, which requires mass participation in our social theory and practice.
And active democracy in all social production – including consciousness, theory, concepts, logic, politics, philosophy, physics, maths, science, arts…
Just when were you thinking of becoming ‘active’, alan? Or are you sticking with passivist materialism? And leave it all, like robbo, to the elite experts?
robbo203 wrote: “It’s in effect saying human consciousness came into being as a result of human consciousness“.
Well, Marx argued that an ‘individual consciousness’ came into being as a result of ‘social consciousness’. ‘Social consciousness’ is a product of human ‘conscious activity’.
If we’re to talk about humans, we have to talk about both consciousness and being, and to separate them, and ask where either came from, in the absence of the other, is meaningless and impossible to resolve. I gave Marx’s statement on this earlier in the thread, so have a look at that.
To clarify, to ask ‘where did human consciousness come from?’ is to simultaneously ask ‘where did human being come from?’.
One can’t argue that ‘consciousness came from being’ (the materialist view) or that ‘being came from consciousness’ (the idealist view). Marx solved the philosophical debate by arguing that both are necessary in any account of ‘origin’ of either. Thus humanity produces humanity, both human consciousness and human being.
So, neither divine conscious activity, nor human biological passivity, but human conscious biological activity. Social production – the scientific key to our mystery. Not ‘mind’ nor ‘matter’, but US. And we can change both.
ALB wrote: “You are right, Robbo, to point out that only an individual human can have “consciousness” in the sense of being “conscious” and so that to talk of humanity having consciousness in that sense can be misleading.”
ALB, can I take it now that you’ve also ditched Marx’s concept of ‘social consciousness’, in favour of robbo’s ‘biological consciousness’?
ALB wrote “For instance when Eugene (not Joseph) Dietzgen writes:
“phenomena outside of us … exist independently of individual man, although they cannot exist for mankind independently of human consciousness”, what did he mean? He would indeed seem to be implying that there is such a thing as “human consciousness” apart from the consciousness of individual humans. Which, as you point out, doesn’t work either as a fact or as an analogy.”Yes, both he and Marx, not only ‘implied’, but openly argued for, ‘human consciousness’. It is a fact.
ALB wrote: “Also, on Eugene Dietzgen’s apparent theory, a “false consciousness” is impossible.”
Well, it is impossible. Marx never claimed it was possible. Engels invented the concept of ‘false consciousness’, not Marx.
Once again, we have a further example of a materialist claiming that if Engels said something, it can be applied to Marx’s views. To do this, one needs, like Lenin, to employ the concept of a unified being, a certain ‘Marx-Engels’.
We’re getting to the nub of the issue here. Is ‘consciousness’ biological or social? Is ‘consciousness’ in ‘the brain’, or in ‘a society’? Where does our ‘consciousness’ come from? From each individual brain, as a biological product, or from a specific society, as a socio-historical product.
I’ll refer to Marx on this issue, rather than robbo or ALB, or indeed, Engels or Lenin.
Robbo, to help you with the philosophy, all that you’ve done is replace the concept ‘material’ with the concept ’emergent’. Both are social products.
And, so as save time, as synonyms of ‘material’, we also have ‘real’, ‘actual’, ‘objective’, ‘physical’, etc.Whatever name you give to your ‘stuff’, I’ll ask you ‘who produced it, and how?’.
This is basic post-Kantian German Idealism, and Marx followed that tradition.
All Marx did to p-KGI was to change the ‘subject’ to ‘humanity’, from the p-KGI ‘divine’. You seem to identify with Fichte, who regarded the ‘subject’ as ‘individual’.
It’s open to anyone, of course, to choose their subject, but Marx chose ‘social’, rather than ‘god’ or ‘biology’.
Sigh!
robbo203 wrote: “I’ve just explained to you that I’ve reject mechanical materialism in favour of emergence theory.”
Is the ’emergent’ outside of social production?
If so, how would humans know the ’emergent’?
If it isn’t, the ’emergent’ is our social product. Who produces and how?robbo203 wrote: “Subjectivity or consciousness requires a brain. A brain is an organ located in biological individuals (normally between the ears but elsewhere in the case of some people I can think of!). Society however does not possess a brain- unless you are talking figuratuively. Ergo, society does not possess, and is incapable of experiencing, consciousness”
The saddest part of this statement is that you really don’t recognise its philosophical and ideological content.
So, it’s not surprising that politics is a complete mystery to you.
Well, you stick with ‘brain equals mind’, which is as profound as ‘power equals muscle’. I know that you’re never going to read any explanation that I can give to you, which is historical and social, so I won’t bother.
Say hello to the ‘wet matter’ and dinosaurs for me, robbo.
